Today marks the second day of an internet shutdown in New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar area and the third day of protests following the end of Sonam Wangchuk’s 26-day indefinite hunger strike. The protests later turned violent amid clashes between protesters and security personnel, with allegations of excessive force by the Delhi Police and the Railway Protection Force (RPF)
Here is the list of all digital developments from the Jantar Mantar protest site:
Telecom companies have cut off internet access at the Jantar Mantar protest site since at least 8:30 pm on July 21. MediaNama’s reporter Prabhanu Kumar Das confirmed this through individuals present at the protest site.
However, the internet appears to be accessible outside the Jantar Mantar area. MediaNama’s subeditor, Rohit Singh, got it confirmed from an individual working near Patel Chowk, around 700 metres to 1 kilometre from the main protest site.
Neither the government nor the telecom operators have made the internet blocking order public. We don’t know how long this internet shutdown will last. On the first day of the internet shutdown (July 20), access to the internet was blocked at around 10:45 AM and later restored around 10 PM. We are not sure exactly when the internet access was restored.
Food delivery and quick-commerce platforms have stopped deliveries to the protest site. MediaNama has checked Zomato and Zomato-owned Blinkit; Swiggy and its Instamart; and Zepto. None of these platforms is currently delivering to the protest site.
MediaNama sent a list of questions to these companies asking why the delivery services have been stopped despite there not being a ban on mobility via roads in that area. We will update the copy if they respond. However, Delhi’s metro has shutdown 16 of its stations.
Here are some of the reels posted by protestors yesterday when a lot of anonymous individuals started ordering food to be distributed among the public: One | Two | Three | Four | Five
With internet services unavailable, individuals have begun using mesh messaging applications that don’t rely on the internet for communication. For instance, Briar, Bitchat and MediaNama’s Editor Nikhil Pahwa’s vibe-coded Messy are a few examples of applications that enable communication between nearby users over Bluetooth or local Wi-Fi hotspots without relying on the internet. Interception of these networks and communications is not possible, especially if the texts are protected by end-to-end encryption.
On July 22, Times of India’s Raj Shekhar Jha reported that Delhi police is ‘investigating Bluetooth messaging apps used’ at the protest site. Responding to this, Pahwa wrote, “lol. What a bunch of idiots in Delhi Police. If the apps don’t collect data, have no server linkage with the provider, may be open-sourced and available to fork, what exactly will you probe? The source code on GitHub?”
Read MP Priyanka Gandhi’s…
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